Dawnkeepers

by Jessica Andersen

  Rabbit hesitated, but his expression didn’t change. “And now that I’m back?”

  “We’ll find a way to deal with whatever’s been done to you, and whatever you’ve done.” Strike paused. “You’re a fuckup, but you’re family. Nothing’s ever going to change that. Got it?”

  The teen swallowed hard and nodded. His voice was thick when he said, “Got it.” After an awkward pause his lips twitched a little. “Please tell me we don’t have to hug now.”

  “Sorry. That’s nonnegotiable.” Strike pulled Rabbit into a manly hug, with lots of backslapping and such.

  Anna’s throat lumped with relief, coupled with a kick of surprise when she realized that Rabbit wasn’t that much shorter than Strike anymore. They’d always assumed the kid was small because he was a half-blood. Maybe he was just taking longer to grow into himself.

  When they finally pulled apart, Rabbit said, “What about Myrinne?”

  Strike grimaced. “As king, I can’t accept her running around here, never mind being set free, without some sort of assurances.” When Rabbit started to protest, he held up a hand. “As a man, though, I can’t overlook the fact that I brought Leah here under very similar circumstances.”

  “With the exception that I wasn’t raised by a witch or held prisoner by the enemy for any great length of time,” Leah put in, laying it out flat. “Sorry, Rabbit, but we just can’t have her here without some sort of oversight.”

  “I won’t have her blood-bound,” Rabbit said. “Not to me, and not to anyone else. If that’s your answer, then we’re out of here.” He paused, expression darkening. “And if you think you can stop me, just try it.”

  Anna didn’t like the way Strike got big at Rabbit’s tone, didn’t like the idea of picking a fight she wasn’t entirely sure the Nightkeepers were going to win, so she stepped between them, turning her back on Rabbit and facing Strike squarely. She looked him in the eye and said, “I’ll take responsibility for her.”

  Which was more than promising to babysit. Even without the blood-bond, if a Nightkeeper claimed a human, the mage was responsible for—and liable for—the human’s actions, eye for eye, tooth for tooth, same as with a bond-servant.

  If Myrinne betrayed the Nightkeepers, Anna would be punished as a traitor; if she killed one of them, Anna would be sacrificed in return. The same was true for Lucius, but the blood-bond allowed her a degree of control over him. Without the blood-bond she would have no magical leverage over Myrinne, no recourse if the girl attempted to escape, or worse. Which meant Anna was essentially hooking her safety to the behavior of a witch’s brat she’d barely spoken to.

  The world seemed to freeze for a second as her rational side screeched, What in the flying hell are you doing?

  She was repaying her debt to Red-Boar by doing what was necessary to keep his son within Skywatch, within the reach of magi who could—hopefully—help him deal with whatever Iago had done to him. Whatever else that meant in terms of her own life and freedom, she’d deal. She was, whether she liked it or not, her father’s daughter, heir to the jaguar bloodline, whose members were notorious for making decisions based on emotion. Damn it.

  Strike’s eyes searched hers. “Are you sure?”

  She was aware of Rabbit holding his breath behind her, aware of a flash of hope coming from him. Within that flash, that emotion, a fragment of a vision broke through, showing her Rabbit and Myrinne hand in hand, running along a beaten snow trail. The vision was from the previous night, she knew, but the Rabbit she saw in the vision was no teen, no boy. Tall, strong, and purposeful, wielding his magic out of necessity rather than anger, he was a man, a Nightkeeper protecting the woman he’d chosen as his mate, even if he didn’t fully recognize the connection yet, or believe in it.

  “Yes,” she said clearly. “I’m sure.” If having Myrinne to lean on, to protect, would help Rabbit find the man the Nightkeepers needed him to be, then it was worth the risk.

  Or so she told herself.

  Strike glanced at Jox, then at Nate and Alexis. “Arguments?”

  “Numerous,” Alexis said dryly. “But none on this particular matter. Fact is, the options are pretty much all equally risky, and this is the one that’ll keep the Nightkeepers intact.”

  “Agreed,” Nate said without looking at her.

  Sitting on the other side of Strike, Jox nodded. “I’ll do what I can to help,” he said to Anna. Knowing the royal winikin as well as she did, she could tell he hated the added exposure she was piling onto herself, but knew it was the only and best option within a culture where both debt and responsibility were weighty matters.

  “Then it’s settled,” she said, pushing the words past a sudden tightness in her throat. She sat back down and waited until Strike and Rabbit had done the same before she said to Rabbit, “Okay. Myrinne described her experiences to Leah pretty thoroughly, but I think it’d be good if you start from the beginning and walk us through what happened, what you learned from Iago.”

  “There’s a second archive,” Rabbit said quietly, looking at his knuckles, which had gone white with fisted tension. “A library. I found out that much.”

  Anna’s breath froze in her lungs, and the world seemed to contract to just the two of them as she whispered, “Iago has it?”

  “No. Not as of last night, anyway. He used my powers to . . . question a woman.” Rabbit’s tone and the disgusted twist to his lips made the word “question” into a curse. “He kept asking her where her father hid the stuff.”

  The connection sparked on a gasp, and Anna blurted, “Sasha!”

  “Did she tell him where to find the library?” Nate asked quickly, his eyes going dark and intent.

  Rabbit shook his head. “No. Her mind is super-strong.” He paused. “It was, anyway.”

  Anna went still. “Why do you say that?”

  “She was linked to Iago when I reversed his mind-bend and tried to fry his cortex.”

  Horror gathered in Anna’s gut, alongside despair that they might’ve already lost their next-best chance at finding the library, and the woman Lucius had sought for reasons she didn’t yet understand but wasn’t willing to ignore. “Is she dead?”

  “She was breathing when I left her. They both were.” He looked to Strike. “I can take you back there.”

  The king nodded and stood. “Let’s go.” But they returned within twenty minutes, empty-handed. Sasha and Iago were gone.

  Lucius didn’t know where he was, didn’t know how to get back to where he was supposed to be. At times he wasn’t even sure he knew where he was supposed to be, only that it wasn’t where he was, so he kept walking, even though he didn’t seem to be getting anywhere.

  His legs ached, but the road he traveled along never changed. The surface was smooth-packed dirt unmarked by tire tracks or hoofprints, though he occasionally saw the tracks of other pedestrians, always headed in the direction he was going, never the other way. On either side of the road, rocky, gray-brown plains stretched out to join somewhere in the distance with a gray-brown sky that held no clouds. There was only gray-brown everywhere, and the road that stretched out in front of him and behind him.

  A part of him wondered if he’d died, if this was the journey the Maya spoke of, where the dead traveled through Xibalba to be sorted according to their actions in life. Those who died a violent death went straight to the sky, while everyone else had to meet a series of underworld challenges, and cross a river whose overlord needed to be paid with the jade pebbles buried over the eyes of the dead.

  So far, though, Lucius hadn’t been challenged by anything worse than boredom, nor did he remember dying, and he had to imagine that wasn’t the sort of thing a guy forgot. Last thing he remembered was—

  Oh, shit. Calling Anna for help as the green haze descended on him. Had he gone makol? Had the Nightkeepers sacrificed him while he’d been caught up in the Day-Glo fugue?

  Amidst a strange sort of calm that had him continuing onward instead of freaking out and running screami
ng into the distance—or just standing still and screaming—he found he didn’t blame Anna and the others if that was what they’d decided. Risk was risk, and one grad student’s life didn’t matter much when balanced against the dozen Nightkeepers who needed to save the world. If he’d gone makol and put the Nightkeepers in danger, then they’d done what they’d needed to do.

  If that was the case, he decided, he was okay with dying.

  The moment he thought that, a shadow appeared in the distance, growing closer as he continued walking. Pretty soon he could make out a high stone arch stretching over the road, with huge, openmouthed serpents carved on either side.

  Beyond it was a wide, sluggish river.

  On instinct, Lucius reached into his pants pocket and found two hard, round objects in there. Pulling them out, he stared at the jade beads. That’s it, then, he thought, sadness breaking through the fog. Game over.

  “Turn around,” a multitonal voice said, coming from nowhere and everywhere at once. “She needs you.”

  Lucius stopped dead, and the fog blinked out of existence. He could see details all of a sudden, could see that the rocky plains on either side of him were painted curtains writhing with reptilian movement from the other side, and the archway was cracked and broken and black, the water brackish and stinking.

  A pit opened up in the center of his stomach, yawning, dark, and terrifying.

  “Who said that?” he called, his voice falling flat in the echoless space.

  There was no answer, but suddenly he had control over his limbs again and could turn around on the path. He took a step back in the direction he’d come. The moment his foot landed, a terrible scream arose from the waterway, then another.

  Lucius didn’t think, didn’t look back. He just started running toward the light that appeared in front of him, at the other end of the road of the damned.

  Back to the land of the living.

  It took most of the day for the members of the royal council to debrief Rabbit and Myrinne, alternating between them when Jox announced it was time for one of the exhausted, malnourished kids to eat or sleep, or both. By the end of the day, as Alexis headed to her rooms to change, shower, and generally take a big breath, she wasn’t convinced they knew much more than they had going in. Or rather, they knew more, but what they’d learned probably wouldn’t go very far toward helping them the next day, when they would ’port to the intersection beneath Chichén Itzá and defend the barrier against Iago and Camazotz.

  The plan was for the Nightkeepers to ’port to the safe house early in the morning and stake out the tunnel entrance. Problem was, they weren’t even sure Iago would be working his magic through the intersection. Rabbit didn’t know if the mage had found the actual hellmouth, the place where the Xibalbans had called the Banol Kax through to earth in A.D. 951. If Iago knew where the hellmouth was, then he had direct access to Xibalba, do not pass go, do not collect, no need for the Nightkeepers’ intersection and its tortuous connections to the sky and underworld.

  If Iago didn’t show at the intersection—which Alexis strongly suspected would be the case—the Nightkeepers would do as they had done during the winter solstice and eclipse, uplinking and banding together to hold the barrier that separated Xibalba from the earth. Strike and Leah would call on the power of Kulkulkan, and Alexis would add Ixchel’s strength to the mix. The barrier was a psi-entity that stretched everywhere and nowhere at once, which meant that if they managed to fortify it with enough power at Chichén Itzá, it should prove impenetrable at the hellmouth. In theory. In reality, they had no frigging clue. And that was the worry that had Alexis unable to settle in her rooms, and had her pacing from one to the next, touching a light fixture here, a book there, somehow needing the tactile reminders, the solidity of the earth plane.

  She and Ixchel were supposed to counteract the first of the demon prophecies, but Alexis had no idea how. The others were acting as though the first prophecy were a moot point, given that Iago planned to bring through all seven of Camazotz’s sons simultaneously. But she wasn’t so sure. If there was no such thing as true coincidence, if everything that was happening was truly influenced by fate, or destiny, or the gods, then shouldn’t the gods have foreseen Iago’s threat? Assuming they had, then that meant Ixchel was supposed to serve a larger purpose, or else she and Alexis wouldn’t have formed the Godkeeper bond.

  Right?

  “I don’t know!” Alexis practically shouted. “I don’t know why she picked me, or how I’m supposed to use her powers.” Her stomach twisted on a gut-deep fear of failure, fear of death. Fear of losing the people she loved.

  Frustrated and heartsore, she threw herself on the sofa, then bounced back up almost immediately when she couldn’t stand not to be moving. It wasn’t just the fears and worries that kept her going, either; the magic of the coming equinox rode her hard. She could close her eyes and tell where the stars were overhead just by feeling their pull and seeing the faint color shimmers they gave off in her soul. The barrier was thinning, and with it her self-control. She wanted to scream and throw things, wanted to drive off into the desert in one of the four-wheelers Jox kept in the garage, wanted to spin the tires and kick up sand and jump the vehicle from hill to hill, though she’d never actually driven one of the damn things.

  Then she heard a knock on the door. She knew who it was without question, and in that instant all the crazy, jumbled needs inside her coalesced into a single emotion.

  Desire.

  She opened the door and saw Nate standing there, exactly as she’d expected, wearing jeans and a soft black pullover that did nothing to gentle the angles of his face and the edgy tension surrounding him. She arched a brow, but before she could work up a witty opener, he said simply, “I know you don’t owe me a damned thing, and you might not want to be around me right now, but I had to come. I need you to know that if I could’ve figured out how to love anyone, I would’ve loved you.”

  The simplicity of that, the finality of it, drove the breath from her lungs and sent a spear of pain through her heart. It took her a second, but once her throat unlocked, she said, “Then why can’t you?”

  “Nature, maybe, or nurture. Maybe both. Probably both.” He lifted a shoulder. “It took me a while to see it, but if you look at the pictures of my parents, my mother’s always the one surrounded by other people, while my father is always apart just a bit. And the paintings . . . they’re all of places seen from a distance. No people, no close-ups. If that’s not detachment, I don’t know what is. Add his DNA to my growing up in the system, and you’ve got a guy who likes people okay but does best alone.” He exhaled long and hard. “Look, I’ve tried to feel the things other people feel, and it . . . it just doesn’t work. It’s just not in me to love someone.” His eyes went very sad. “Not even you. I’m so sorry.”

  Alexis bowed her head as all the restless energy drained into a moment of pure, profound emotion. It wasn’t heartache; that would come later, she knew. It wasn’t failure, either, though she was due for a heaping pile of that too. No, this was a piercing regret that the things they’d already had together were the end of it, even if they survived the equinox. There would be no moving into Nate’s cottage and waking up next to him each morning, no trying to cook for each other and sneaking food from the main mansion when the stuff didn’t turn out, no hardwood floors and little smoke-motif knickknacks.

  “Alexis, please say something,” he pressed when she’d been silent for too long. His lips twitched in a small, sad smile. “Either that or rack me a good one and slam the door. Whichever works for you.”

  “Maybe it’s better this way,” she said slowly. “Maybe it’s better to go into tomorrow without this between us.” Better to go into battle with nothing she was looking forward to except more fighting, more training. More war.

  Maybe that was what this had been about all along. Maybe the goddess had been trying to teach her to let go.

  He exhaled a long breath. “Good. Okay . . . good.” H
e didn’t look as though he thought it was good, but she understood that too. “So . . .”

  “So . . .” Now she did smile at him, letting him know it was really okay. “See you tomorrow.” She shut the door between them, not slamming it, but shutting it slowly and letting the latch engage with a final-sounding click.

  Then, and only then, she finally collapsed onto the couch and put her face in her hands. Her hair, unbound and still moist from her shower, fell forward in long, ribbonlike strands.

  And when she wept, her tears were rainbows.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

  March 21

  The Nightkeepers joined up well before dawn, and Strike ’ported them to the temple site—except for Rabbit, who remained at Skywatch along with Myrinne and Lucius. The three of them were locked in the warded storerooms with armed winikin standing guard, two at a time, in four-hour shifts. All but Hannah and Wood, who were still in hiding with the twins.

  The Nightkeepers’ numbers were dwindling rather than building, Nate realized with a shimmer of unease.

  They waited in the deep darkness that held on to the rain forest in the final hour before daybreak while Michael checked the surveillance system in the small house near the temple. When his all-clear signal came through Strike said, “Okay, gang, it’s more than twelve hours before the equinox and eleven or so before the tunnel inside the temple opens up. Let’s start with just a couple of people on watch outside the temple, and rotate through every two hours. Volunteers?”

  Nate raised his hand, figuring that if he had to stay cooped up in the little house with the rest of them for very long, he was going to go batshit crazy. From the number of hands showing, he wasn’t the only one.

  Strike snorted. “That’s about what I thought. Okay, it’s me and Nate on first shift. The rest of you duke it out for the next one. We’ll add one extra person per two-hour block, with everyone on station by midafternoon.”